As the black cockies came down from the mountain, a howling gale took hold and I was filled with foreboding.
My wife and I were driving to the East Coast for a wedding on the sands of Spring Beach and with the yellow-tailed black cockatoos signalling a warning about the weather, we were fearful that the nuptials would be ruined.
It would not be just the wedding cake in tiers.
Although there’s an old saying in Tasmania that cockies coming down from the high country forecast snow, even in summer, I have always dismissed myth and superstition associated with birds – like the belief in some parts that grey fantails entering a house bring bad luck. I must say, however, that over the years the cockies have been remarkably prescient when it comes to inclement weather.
To prove the point, when we reached our bed and breakfast accommodation in Orford on the morning of the wedding, a group of mainland tourists also arriving there had announced that hours previously they had been throwing snowballs on the summit of kunanyi/Mt Wellington.
The final days of spring and there was snow on the mountain. Our hearts sank.
It had been something of a thrill to be invited to our first beach wedding by wildlife artist Helen Barnard and her fiancé Fraser Johnson. We didn’t even know that such events occurred in the Apple Isle, thinking they were usually reserved for places like Fiji and Samoa.
With a backdrop of Maria Island, the choice of location for the wedding was a superb one and I’m happy to say that the wind dropped and the skies cleared just before it took place.
And before the ceremony there was even a little time for birdwatching. Guests had been careful not to intrude on a patch of beach reserved for threatened hooded plovers, and pied oystercatchers probed the soft wet sands on a receding tide for invertebrates, their piping call echoing around the beach’s twin headlands as they took flight.
Out to sea crested terns swooped and dived for fish a little off-shore and in the far distance I could make out the shape of a white-bellied sea eagle cruising down the coast towards Marion Bay further to the south-east.
Birds on this occasion, though, had to take second-place to the wedding of my friends but just as the ceremony was ending, with promises of celebratory champagne at a nearby shack, some uninvited, feathered guests gate-crashed the party.
By a remarkable coincidence, a family of black cockies arrived in she-oaks framing the back beach, noisily uttering their contact call which to some ears sounds like a squeaking door, to others the lament of Irish poets, a keen or Gaelic caoine.
I always hear the black cockie call in a more optimistic tone. For once the cockies were not obeying myth and fable, bringing bad news about the weather. Their arrival was a portent for the future, a sunny one for a couple getting married on a pristine Tasmanian beach.